1. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a system for organizing information and in particular to a dynamic personalized information organizer.
2. The Relevant Technology
Organization of information is a very personal thing. Countless studies have shown that people think and organize data differently. An article by Vannevar Bush, entitled “As We May Think”, published in the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly describes how people associate information, and made a prediction of a machine for managing information based on an extension of what was known at the time. Mr. Bush wrote that the human mind operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Mr. Bush then proposed a futuristic device which is a mechanized private file and library called a memex. He describes a memex as a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
Mr. Bush envisioned encyclopedias with a ready made mesh of associative trails running through them. This vision of the future predicts many of the navigational features of the Internet. He even describes the ability to insert comments, either linking it into a main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. However, it describes a futuristic system where the user has their own copy of all the information in order to properly catalog and associate it.
This points out several problems with existing computer systems and ways of organizing information. Constricting oneself to the organization of information by another can be very frustrating and result in slower use and assimilation of the information.
There are many ways of organizing information in known computer systems. One of the first ways of organizing information involves giving human readable names to addressable files which contain anything from computer programs to documents and images. The names may even be related to each other in a hierarchical manner, commonly known as a directory tree. Using a directory tree, programmers may place new programs in a directory under a “programs” directory to make them somewhat organized and easier to maintain. Users may then personalize the manner in which their information is stored by perhaps placing all their documents in a “my documents” directory with subdirectories for different categories of documents and other information the user wants to be able to find again.
One problem with this kind of organizational structure is that it is difficult to change the organization of the information. Many times programs have to be located in a certain directory for them to even operate. Further, the organization of much of the information is done by someone else. Each individual user may have a different desired way of organizing their own information. It is very difficult to personalize the organization of information using the existing ways of organizing information. It usually involves the user having their own copy of the information, leading to much duplication and little assurance that such copy is up to date. Further, as new information is developed, each user must then fit it into their personal organization infrastructure. Another problem is that the user must either have a specific organization that they use and remember well enough to know where to find a particular document or other copy of information. Some systems provide varying forms of indirect referencing, such as allowing the creation of shortcuts, which give the user the impression that the information is actually where they want it to be. These are very limited in their ability to actually provide a dynamic organizational structure that a user may desire.
The Internet and the world wide web provide a new layer of organization, allowing some form of organization among information contained in multiple computer systems coupled together by a network. Uniform resource locators (URLs) allow addressability of the information from any point on the network. Hypertext links are embedded in documents and other information to provide users the ability to jump to another document located anywhere on the web. These links are very beneficial. However, they always reflect someone else's organization of the information that is embedded in the information itself. It is common experience for people to start searching the web for information on one topic, and find themselves immersed in a completely different topic in a very short time.
Further prior ways to organize information on computer systems comprises the use of relational databases, where information can be categorized and sorted or searched by subject, author, and many other fields. This is similar to the card catalogs long used by libraries. It provides no ability to personalize the organization, other than by creating new fields which can be entered and then used to sort or search the data. Relationships between the entries in the database can be defined by the use of relational algebra. This, however, does not provide the ability to specify relationships beyond those algebraic relationships provided by the database. When a relational database is built, the expressions that can be built are normally fixed. The database may only be modified by a limited set of relational expressions. It can't be extended without extending the database. Also, it can't take data into it that does not fit as a value of some expression that the database allows to be modeled. Not only is the actual organization of the data limited by the available set of relationships, so is the appearance or view of the data (and the view of the organization of the data). Views and Organizations of data are interrelated. Typically data has to be organized according to some pre-defined system of relationships and users are limited to a corresponding vocabulary.
There is a need for a system which allows a user to create their own organization of information without having to have their own copy of all the information. There is a need to have the ability to create such an organization independent from other organizations of the information. There is a further need to be able to organize information without changing the information so that each user can have their own organization.